Deep River Page 2

  That thrilled her. He had a revolutionary name. Voitto meant victory.

  “I’m Aino Koski.”

  “Are you a socialist?” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes. A socialist. But my father, he’s a nationalist.” She hesitated and looked around. “He goes along with most people saying he just wants to return to autonomy, like what we had under the Swedes. It’s safer, but he really wants the Russians gone.”

  “And the man next to him? Your brother?”

  “No, the district teacher. He’s from Helsinki. He’s staying with us.” She looked around, then leaned in and whispered, “He gave me a copy of The Communist Manifesto.” She watched for a reaction. He nodded his head and craned around her and her father to look at Mr. Järvinen. Then Aino asked, “Have you read it?”

  “Of course,” he said quietly now, no longer whispering. “I’ve read everything he wrote, Engels, too.” There was a pause. “I can read German.”

  She was thrilled; he was trying to impress her.

  “I read it in a Russian translation,” she replied.

  “Did you really read The Communist Manifesto in Russian?”

  “Yes. Plekhanov’s eighteen eighty-two translation.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How do you know Russian?”

  “My father is fluent.” She hastened to explain. “He’s educated. So is my mother,” she added. Then she felt bad. She was trying to say that her family weren’t just peasant farmers, but a socialist shouldn’t care. “Worked for the government, before he got into political trouble. Then he built churches in Russia before he met my mother.” She smiled. “It was a game with us, but the Russian lessons stopped when it became mandatory for government workers.” She laughed. “The pastor lets me read his Russian novels.”

  He blinked. “I’ve never met a girl who’s even read the Manifesto, much less in Russian.”

  “Girls aren’t socialists?”

  “No, no. Lots of girls are socialists: Beatrice Webb who started the Fabians in England and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. In America, Mary Jones, Mother Jones, who—” He came to a stop, coloring suddenly, which she liked. “I mean, here in Kokkola, I never met a girl socialist.”

  “Well, you have now,” she said proudly, surprising herself to realize that yes, indeed, yes, she was a socialist. She would do something instead of just sitting on her hands talking about independence like her father. What good would independence do if Finland was still run by the same oppressor class?

  Three weeks later when Aino came down to breakfast, her copy of The Communist Manifesto was at her place at the table. She immediately glared at Matti, who vigorously shook his head no. Sternly silent, Maíjaliisa plunked down Aino’s bowl of oatmeal mush right on top of the book. How stupid to hide it under the mattress. Of course, her mother would clean there. Aino turned calmly to Matti. “Pass the sugar, please.”

  Tapio came from their bedroom and sat at the head of the table. When Maíjaliisa put his mush in front of him, she gave Tapio the you’re-the-father look and nodded her head toward Aino.

  “Where did you get this pamphlet?” Tapio asked.

  Maíjaliisa could no longer contain herself. “Do you realize what could happen to you, to us, if the wrong people found out you have this? The czar’s secret police, the Okhrana, would arrest—”

  Tapio gestured for her to be quiet and she bit back her fear.

  Aino was thinking that if she told the truth, Mr. Järvinen would be in deep trouble. But if she lied? But which lie? She blurted out, “Voitto gave it to me.”

  “Who?” Maíjaliisa asked.

  “Oskar Penttilä,” Aino mumbled.

  Maíjaliisa sat down at the table with her own bowl.

  “The boy you introduced me to at the lecture?” Tapio asked.

  Aino nodded.

  Tapio looked at Maíjaliisa. “See, you may be wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. What would some Kokkola boy be doing with that trash written in Russian?” Maíjaliisa asked.

  “Well, Aino read it in Russian,” Tapio said. He then focused on his oatmeal.

  Maíjaliisa allowed the silence to ripen and then said, “Helmi Rinne swears she found crazy socialist literature in the barn. When she showed it to her son, Pekka, he said Aino gave it to him.”

  “That’s a lie!” Aino burst out.

  Maíjaliisa slapped her in an automatic response. She lowered her hand, glaring at Aino as much for her outburst as for the issue at hand. “Just the way it’s a lie about this Oskar boy giving it to you? I think Mr. Järvinen has been giving extra lessons.” She turned to Tapio. “If the police find this literature, all of us fall under suspicion. We’re not paying him to teach dangerous political ideas or put us in danger. We need to talk to the other parents.”

  “About what?” Aino asked.

  “Quiet,” Maíjaliisa said to Aino. She turned to Tapio. “We hired him to teach writing and sums, not to preach an ungodly political philosophy to good Christian children.”

  “Mr. Järvinen says it’s not about religion,” Aino said. “It’s about injustice.”

  This time Tapio slapped his palm on the table. “That’s enough out of you,” he said.

  Maíjaliisa turned on Aino. “Marx and Engels are atheists!”

  “That doesn’t make everyone who reads them an atheist,” Aino mumbled.

  “You go to your room!” Tapio shouted.

  When Aino was gone, Maíjaliisa turned to her husband and said, “We hire teachers to teach what we want our children to learn, not what the teachers want them to learn.”

  Three days later, when Aino came down the ladder dressed for school, Maíjaliisa told her the parents had fired Mr. Järvinen. Aino threw her books on the floor. “It’s not fair! You can’t!”

  “We did,” Maíjaliisa said. “Now pick up those books or I’ll slap you silly.”

  Aino stood as tall as she could, looking straight at her mother. Their eyes were on the same level. Maíjaliisa looked right back. She raised her hand slightly, palm open.

  Aino picked up the books.

  Maíjaliisa let out her breath. “Mrs. Rinne will do the best she can until we get a real teacher,” she said. “This time it’s going to be a woman and we’ll be sure she’s a Christian.”

  2

  That April of 1902, the month Järvinen was fired, a very strong wind blew for days, destroying at least half of the tender new rye shoots throughout the district. There was barely enough rye to harvest for their own winter consumption and none to sell for cash. Then, as if a vindictive Pokkanen, the Frost, the son of Puhuri, the North Wind, had it in for the district farmers, he sent a brief snowstorm in August. It soon melted, but the hay was left cool, drooping, and wet. Tapio and Maíjaliisa prayed for dry weather, but the sky remained leaden and overcast. Finally, in late September, Tapio made the decision to cut the hay before winter frosts set in. It went into the barn too damp and by Christmas had started to rot. The family’s beloved horse, Ystävä, who they all called Ysti, got thin. The cow developed soft bone and gave less milk. With the tiny rye harvest, Maíjaliisa had resorted to making pettuleipä, mixing the rye flour with bones from fish that Matti caught and the inner bark of the silver birch trees. By January, the women of the district would gather outside after church and whisper about the possibility of famine. The last one had killed nearly two hundred thousand people—over 10 percent of the population—only three decades earlier.

  Aino had made up for the lack of a schoolteacher by reading books borrowed from Pastor Nieminen, the minister of the big church in Kokkola and a friend of Pastor Jarvi. Jarvi had written, explaining that Aino had read through his own library and was a good Christian girl.

  The good Christian girl, however, had learned that Oskar Penttilä was going to speak in Kokkola. She couldn’t go into town on her own, and she certainly could never tell her mother that she was going to a socialist lecture. She bribed Matti with an offer to clean all the fish he caught for two weeks as well as scrape
the insides of the pelts he’d collect from his next two trap runs if he would hitch Ysti to the family sledge and take her to town.

  She told Maíjaliisa that they were going to Kokkola to return books to Pastor Nieminen. She had earlier borrowed five books and hidden two in the barn, taking three into the house to read. On the afternoon of the lecture, she dropped the three in the barn. After the lecture she would take the two back to the house, along with appropriate excitement.

  Matti was still acting slightly put-upon. “Acting” was the relevant word, because he was secretly delighted that he’d finally put one over on his big sister. He’d heard that a rich Russian in Kokkola had a three-and-a-half-horsepower Benz Velo motorcar, and he wanted to see one. Unlike his mother, he didn’t care one way or the other what his big sister did with her time.

  What Aino did with her time was fall in love—for real this time, not as with Mr. Järvinen.

  The Kokkolan Työväentalo was a wooden building sheathed with rust-red shiplap that served as a shop during the day and a dance hall or meeting place for social democrats and other left-leaning groups at night. Aino took a place inside, standing by the wall.

  When Oskar Penttilä arrived, she shrank back against it, making sure her head scarf obscured her face. Some old man took the floor talking about unions. He sat down to polite applause. Then Oskar took the floor. Oskar talked about overthrowing the chains of capitalism. His voice made the blood rush to her throat so that she was afraid to swallow.

  When Oskar finished speaking, clearly pleased with the applause, Aino shoved her glasses into the large front pocket of her heavy skirt and moved to wait by the door, trying not to squint. As Oskar emerged, she pretended to be looking the other way and stumbled into him. Aino was a midwife’s daughter and not shy about her body or anyone else’s for that matter; she’d been helping her mother with births since she was twelve. With just average looks and those damned glasses, she was at a distinct disadvantage, at least in the winter when her thick clothing covered what she knew was a beautiful figure. If she could just get him talking—well really, just get him listening, since most Finn boys didn’t talk idly—there wasn’t a boy in the district she couldn’t hold, summer or winter.

  With a few genuine compliments on his speaking abilities followed by some keenly perceptive questions on socialist theory she had him hooked.

  She could have killed Matti when he showed up early with the sledge. She refined that feeling to death by slow torture when Matti began acting like a brat, lightly switching Ysti forward and then pulling him backward in a repeated display of impatience.

  She forgot her anger instantly when she turned to look back from the sledge and saw Oskar watching her.

  Matti was good with horses. In fact, he was good with anything that involved ropes, cables, animals, machinery, and tools. If Aino saw a huge boulder in the field, she assumed it to be immovable. Matti, on the other hand, would spend time thinking about how to move it. Then, with levers, block and tackle, teamed horses, crowbars, the help of a few friends, and a lot of swear words, the boulder was moved. Even though Matti was two years her junior, Aino felt secure and carefree with him driving. Wrapped in a rug made from the skin of one of the few remaining bears that Tapio had shot as a teenager, with just her dark eyes exposed to the cold, she had her mind on Oskar.

  The sleigh took a sudden short shift to the left, breaking Aino’s reverie. They were passing dark figures, struggling alongside the roadway, burdened with heavy bundles. Children, the small ones roped together for safety so they wouldn’t stray and freeze to death, trudged in a line behind their parents. Ysti’s bells jingled as Matti clucked him forward a little faster.

  Aino came out of her cocoon and looked back on the dark group until it was swallowed in the early afternoon gloom. She looked over at Matti.

  “City people,” he said. “No skis.” He shook his head slightly. “Probably from the Salminen Brothers’ shipyard. No one wants wooden boats anymore.”

  “But why are they on the road?”

  Matti looked at his big sister with the you-are-really-stupid look that only a younger brother could give a big sister. “No work, no wages,” Matti said. “No wages, no rent money. No rent money, no place to live. How hard is that to understand?”

  Aino flared. “Only an idiot would look at it that way.” She set her jaw. “The houses they were thrown out of just sit there empty. None of these people need to be homeless. No private ownership, no evictions.”

  “Yes. Socialist heaven. They can keep on building wooden boats no one wants to pay them for and then eat our rye without paying us.”

  The brother and sister rode the rest of the way in silence, passing two more struggling families.

  Around seven that evening their old dog, Musti, started barking without getting up from in front of the stove. Aino went to the small window. Yellow light from the kerosene lantern flickered on the snow. A small group of people huddled together, just at the edge of the light. One of them separated from the group and came to the door and knocked.

  Maíjaliisa peered over Aino’s shoulder. “Don’t answer it,” she said to Tapio, who was already going to the door. “Beggars.”

  “What can they want, Maíjaliisa? A little bread?”

  “And then the word is out and tomorrow more bread for more beggars? We’re already eating birch bark.”

  “We’re eating. They—”

  “I was ten during the great hunger years. I watched my grandmother and two cousins die of starvation.”

  “I lived through it, too,” Tapio said. “We’re not there yet.”

  “The shipyards are closing. They’ll be swarming into the countryside. They’ll swarm here and we’ll be beggars like them.”

  Tapio hesitated. Aino stormed past him and threw open the door. Even in the freezing air a terrible smell assailed her. A man, probably the father, took off his hat. “Please. Please. We have small children. Just a little food? And can we stay in your barn tonight?”

  “Go on. Get out.” Maíjaliisa was actually shooing at him with her apron as if he were a chicken.

  The man pleaded with her silently with stricken eyes. “Please. We are very near …” He hesitated. “The children, without food, they will freeze.”

  Maíjaliisa tried to shut the door in his face. Her eyes were wild with fear.

  Tapio reached across the threshold, making it impossible for her to shut the door. “They can stay in the barn, Maíjaliisa,” he said. Snarling with frustration at him, she shoved Tapio away from the door with both hands on his chest and ran for their bedroom. Tapio turned back to the man. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have food to spare.”

  Aino spun around, heading for the cupboard next to the stove. Tapio said in a clear firm voice, “No, Aino.” That stopped her. Tapio told the man where to find the barn and hay for bedding, nodded good evening, and quietly shut the door.

  Aino heard something at the window. A girl, perhaps eleven years old, crying, her face twisted with pain, had pressed herself against the glass. Her father gently took her away from the window and the family disappeared into the darkness, walking toward the barn.

  When she was sure her mother and father slept, Aino slipped from her bed, quietly pulled on her wool stockings beneath her long wool nightgown, and carrying her wooden clogs crept down the steep ladder. She put her coat on, went to the cupboard, and pulled out the loaf of pettuleipä that Maíjaliisa had made for breakfast. Holding it against her with one arm, she quietly slipped on the clogs, unlatched the door, and ran across the frozen snow.

  She was shivering when she entered the dark barn. She located the family by their smell. Approaching awkwardly, unable to see, she brushed up against someone—the mother. She had two of her children tucked against her, her apron around them. She had stuffed every available space with straw to retain their body heat. When Aino put the bread beneath her nose, the woman grabbed her arm. She broke down in sobs. Aino, embarrassed at how the smell revolted her, p
atted her on the shoulder and then made her way back to her warm bed. Anger at the senseless cruelty of it all kept her awake all night.

  A few months later, with the spring thaw, Matti uncovered the frozen body of a small boy next to the barn. One of his thin arms had been revealed by the melting snow. He was probably around three years old.

  Tapio wrapped the little frozen corpse in a burlap gunnysack, and the whole family drove the body to the church. They found Pastor Jarvi in the parsonage and Tapio explained what had happened.

  “But, I can’t bury it here,” Jarvi said. “I don’t know if it’s been baptized.”

  Tapio put his hand on Aino’s arm before she had a chance to say a word. Then he said evenly to Jarvi, “Then what do you suggest we do with him?”

  Jarvi looked at the floor of the parsonage porch where they were standing. “There’s a place,” he mumbled, “just over by the river.”

  “A place,” Tapio repeated.

  “You know, a place, where we bury the unconsecrated.”

  “Will you help us bury this little boy?”

  Jarvi swallowed and looked over their heads. “I shouldn’t,” he said.

  Aino spun around and walked back to the wagon.

  Then Maíjaliisa climbed up a step and stood close to him. “Is it God that doesn’t want you to bury this child or the church?”

  Jarvi’s jaw was rippling just slightly from the rapid movement of his incisors being held against his bottom teeth. “Mrs. Koski,” he said. “You put me in a terrible position. I’m sorry.” He turned back into the house, leaving the Koskis on the front porch. They turned at the sound of Aino bringing up the wagon.

  “We’ll bury him by the cherry trees where I can watch over him,” Maíjaliisa said.

  With that, the family drove back to the farm where Matti dug a small grave. Tapio led them all in the first verse of “Beautiful Savior,” playing the accompaniment on his kantele, and then repeated the litany for burial, forever burned into his heart from burying his own children. He read from the family Bible: first from Job, I know my redeemer lives; and then from First Peter, By His great mercy, he has given us new birth; and finally from the Gospel of John, The light shines in darkness. They all said the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, Aino joining in for her parents’ sake. They silently tossed some dirt on the little brown bundle and Matti filled in the grave.